Saturday, December 22, 2012

A defense secretary of their own

How bad has it gotten for the US antiwar movement? After the
president its most prominent leaders supported in 2008 took George W.
Bush's war on terror and institutionalized it, they have been at a
strategic loss, unable to kick their dogmatic, electoral-minded
tactics to the point that they are now engaged in an awkward campaign
to get a conservative Republican appointed to administer Barack
Obama's wars. Indeed, after getting a commander-in-chief of its own, the
down-and-out antiwar movement is now angling to get its own defense secretary.

The logic behind the leftists for Chuck Hagel campaign -- sometimes unstated -- is not so much
that he's a great guy, but that the people attacking him are even
worse. And to be fair, they're right. Most of the people blasting
the former Nebraska senator hail from the belligerent far right,
primarily employed by neoconservative media outlets like the Weekly
Standard and Washington
Post.Their
critique is that Hagel is no
friend of the Jewish state, and perhaps even anti-Semitic, because he
once made comments critical of its influential
lobby in
DC and opposed Israel's 2006
war on Lebanon (an undeniably good thing). He's also
talked about giving diplomacy a shot with Iran, when the proper line is supposed to be "nah, fuck those guys."

Hagel has also come under fire from
military lobbyists for his stated desire to cut bloat at the
Pentagon, though it's
worth remembering that Bush/Obama
secretary of defense Robert Gatespledged the same thing while
burning through the biggest
military budgets in world history. In other words, the usual
sky-is-falling crowd is making much ado about nothing with
respect to a guy who, outside of a few maverick-y speeches over the years, adheres to the
Washington consensus as much as the next old white guy. Their goal? Maybe a nice little war with a third-rate power
and a bitlarger
share of the GDP. But like executives at Goldman Sachs, they know they're going to be pretty much fine no matter who is in office.

It would be one thing to simply point this out; that yes, some of the charges against Hagel can politely be called “silly.”
One can disagree about the wisdom of Israeli wars, for instance, without being a raging
anti-Semite, and indeed much of the Israeli establishment would
privately concede their 2006 war was a bust. And with politicians
talking of slashing Social Security, you damned well better believe
it's not a gaffe to say maybe we ought to take a quick look at where half the
average American's income tax goes: the military. Such a defense might have some value.

Unfortunately, that's not what the pro-Hagel campaign is doing.
Instead, they're billing the fight over Hagel's nomination as a
defining battle of Obama's second term. If Hagel wins, the argument goes, AIPAC loses, opening up the foreign policy debate in
Washington and increasing the possibility of peace in our time. If his nomination goes down, however, that reinforces the
idea that the hawkish foreign policy consensus in Washington shall not be
challenged and that even the mildest criticisms of Israel cannot be
tolerated. Some even suggest that who administers the Defense
Department could decide if there's a war with Iran or not, perhaps forgetting the chain of command.

Indeed, most of Hagel's defenders aren't defending his occasionally
heterodox views on Israel and unilateral sanctions (he's cool with the multilateral, 500,000-dead-children-in-Iraq kind), but rather
trumpeting his commitment to orthodoxy. The Center for American Progress, for
instance, has released
a dossier detailing “Chuck Hagel's Pro-Israel Record,” noting
his oft-stated verbal and legislative commitment to the “special
relationship.” Some of his
former staffers have also issued
a fact sheet showing that all of Hagel's alleged heretical views
are well within the hawkish mainstream.

Further left on the spectrum, it's
not much different. The Washington-based group Just Foreign Policy,
for instance, has revived Democratic rhetoric from 2004 to pitch
the fight over the potential Hagel nomination in black and white
terms of good and evil.

“The Obama-hating Neocon Right is
trying to 'Swift Boat' the expected nomination of Chuck Hagel to be
Secretary of Defense,” the group states
in a recent email
blast to supporters. Neoconservatives have been “making up a
fantasy scare story that Hagel . . . is 'anti-Israel,'” it continues, helpfully
informing us that the Hagel the neocons make out to be such a
reasonable guy is indeed a fantasy.Finally, it ends with an appeal: “We
cannot stand idly by as the neocons stage a coup of our foreign
policy,” followed by a petition supporting Hagel's nomination hosted by
MoveOn.org sure to defeat any military coup.

In
a blog, the group's policy director, Robert Naiman, likewise
pitches the battle over Hagel's nomination in terms of Obama vs. The
Warmongers. “Hagel
represents the foreign policy that the majority of Americans voted
for in 2008 and 2012: less war, more diplomacy,” he writes, pointing
to past statements he's made about the wisdom of a war with Iran.

Of course, the unfortunate truth is that American's didn't vote for “less war, more diplomacy,” as comforting as that thought may be, because they haven't had the chance. In this past election, Obama
often ran to the right of Mitt Romney, his campaign frequently suggesting the
latter would not have had the guts to kill Osama bin Laden. The
DNC ridiculed Romney for suggesting he'd consider the war's legality
before bombing Iran. “Romney Said He Would Talk To His Lawyers
Before Deciding Whether To Use Military Force,” read
the press release,
as if that's a bad thing. Obama, bomber of a half-dozen countries, never forgot to mention the “crippling” sanctions he's
imposed.

And
J Street, the group that just co-sponsored a rally with AIPAC backing
the Israeli state's latest killing spree? Ask a resident of Gaza how
“pro-peace” it is.

But, in order to create a sign-this-petition!
narrative,
one often
can't
do nuance. So
Naiman doesn't. In
another
post, this
onehighlighting
Hagel's establishment support, because antiwar activists care about that sort of thing,
he
casually
refers to former ambassador Ryan Crocker as among the “diplomacy
champions and war skeptics” backing the former senator.
This would be the same Ryan Crocker appointed by George W. Buish whohas
said
“it's simply not the case that Afghans would rather have US forces
gone,”and
dismissed the killing of at least 25 people in Afghanistan, including children, as
“not
a very big deal.”

That
should give you a good idea of the obfuscation going on in the
antiwar campaign for a Pentagon chief. This
is a problem. If you're going to play the role of the savvy
Washington activist and get involved in the inside baseball that is
fights over cabinet appointments, ostensibly to reframe the debate
more than anything –
we
must defeat AIPAC! –
you ought not go about reinforcing adherence to orthodoxy and the
perceived value of establishment support and credentials. And
you ought not cast as heroes of the peace movement people that really
shouldn't be. That's actually really dangerous.

Yet, some would rather play down Hagel's pro-war credentials for the
all-important narrative. So we cast him as a staunch opponent of a
war with Iran, ignoring his repeated assertions that we must “keep
all options on the table” with respect to the Islamic Republic,
including killing men, women and children. In a piece he coauthored
with other establishment foreign policy figures, Hagel's opposition
to war amounted merely to a call to consider its costs – and its
benefits.

For
instance, “a U.S. attack would demonstrate the country’s
credibility as an ally to other nations in the region and would
derail Iran’s nuclear ambitions for several years, providing space
for other, potentially longer-term solutions,” the senator and his
friends wrote. “An attack would also make clear the United States’
full commitment to nonproliferation as other nations contemplate
moves in that direction.” Ah, but he mentioned there could be
“costs” (though none of those he mentioned were “dead people”).
Such is brave, antiwar opposition in Washington.

But
that's the cynical game played in DC by
some of the would-be movers-and-shakers on the outskirts of the
policy conversation: cynically play down a politician's faults to
please funders, other politicians and one's own sense of savvy
self-satisfaction.
It's how the antiwar movement ended up dissolving and largely getting
behind a president who more than doubled the number of troops in
Afghanistan. People were presented a rosy image of a candidate who
was on their side and they
concluded their work was done upon his election. The same thing
threatens to be the case with Chuck Hagel.
Indeed,
as The
Atlantic'sJeffrey
Goldberg notes, “who better to sell the president's militant
Iran position than someone who comes from the realist camp?”

When
I privately raised some of these concerns with Naiman, he got snooty
quick,
just as he did with other
writers who questioned whether the quest to “defeat AIPAC”
should be conducted by stressing why
AIPAC should love the guy.
To
me, Naiman
wrote that if I had concerns about the antiwar movement taking
ownership of a defense secretary, “There are plenty of
organizations that pursue an ultra-left, ideological purist line. Why
don't you give them your support and be happy?”

We live in an an age where ideological purity is defined as being uncomfortable with an antiwar organization throwing unequivocal support behind a conservative Republican to head the Pentagon. It's an amazing world.

Rather than engage in the reactionary politics of supporting what one perceives to be the least-evil administrator of war, those on the antiwar left and right ought to be truth tellers. Let's not sugar coat this: The problem isn't just AIPAC and the neocons, but the Center for American Progress and the neoliberals. Dumbing down the reality only serves to bolster one faction of the war party. And it kills antiwar movements.

7 comments:

Mr. Davis,Speaking as a member of the sclerotic old white boy club I abhor the Neo-Conservatives and the Neo-Liberals, they are twins. I won't use the word evil because it's repugnant political theology. If anything Hegel represent the tiniest deviation of the norm of the Washington Consensus, of the moment. President Obama has no balls, he is Bobby Kennedy circa 1968, neither felt comfortable outside political respectability but very good at the rhetoric of ersatz progressivism.I'm reading Ulrich Beck's 20 Observations On A World In Turmoil. In that books he posits the notion of 'international domestic politics'i.e. cosmopolitanism. Not utopian speculation but as our denied but actual political condition. So for me, in my advanced state of personal hope or even delusion, the defeat of the Neo-Cons functions as a clearing away of pathological impediment to a realization of that hope and or delusion. You have argued your case very succinctly, but to drive a wedge in that Washington Consensus is the beginning of the possibility of a larger breach.Gradualism, yes. I fight for that small breach, not for Obama or Hegel but for republican values writ large.Best regards,StephenKMackSD

what if this is all besides the point.You seem to be anticipating that people are, at their core, worthy of some idealized dignity known as 'human'.What if they just keep busy and fear the other, period.So that even among those who, under ideal freedom, you presume would do good, in fact would always just demonize opponents in order to justify their own pathetic failings.That is, in a world where republicans were in fact less belligerent than democrats, the peace-democrats (so called) would in fact, rather than seize the wedge to create more peace on their own turf, where they had power, in fact just circled the wagons around a war mongering democrat party and decried the demon neocons as warmongers.

Oh wait, we just had an election based on that. Lots of moments based on that. Who is a 'better' friend of Israel (that is, of the aggressive, conservative Israel, not "israel in general, a democratic state"), who is more aggressive in attacking countries.And a personal favorite of mine,the greatest tweet ever from a gay-lebuty lefty granola universal humanist:

SandraBernhard that's right he rode into town and took him down #osamabinladin @barackobama did the job the GOP claimed they would #dnc2012 12:49 AM Sep 7th from web

What a world indeed. Keep hoping for that 'wedge'.Btw, @SandraBernhard hasn't had a word to say about peace or politics since the west was won. I guess, once you vote right, the world is alright.

You might also reduce everything to usVthem and consider that the real point is that the antiwar movement is no different from anyone else in the usVthem model.That quote, pared down just to

"@barackobama did the job the GOP claimed they would #dnc2012"

can be applied to anything these days. And guess who cheers.For some reason, the lefty international affairs/civil liberties crowd seems to forget this completely, and thinks the democrats stick to their side only because of the far more immediate-to-them domestic agenda. Which is a hypothesis that would be plausible if the facts were completely different.

It's also possible that the decision was offered. And any candidate who wanted to win, knew they had to play the belligerent racist card. So, Obama MAY be ultimately less likely to go war on Iran. So might what'sisnameagain have been.

But it was the voters who wouldn't choose a peace candidate. And the candidates gave them what they wanted.